Top 5 AI Gateways for Multi-Model Routing

TL;DR

AI gateways have become critical infrastructure for teams building with multiple LLMs. This article covers five leading options: Bifrost, Cloudflare AI Gateway, LiteLLM, Vercel AI Gateway, and Kong AI Gateway, comparing them across platform overview, key features, and best use cases.

Why Multi-Model Routing Matters

No single LLM is best for every task. Production AI systems increasingly rely on multiple providers simultaneously, routing requests based on cost, latency, capability, or availability. An AI gateway sits between your application and your LLM providers to handle this routing, failover, caching, and observability in one unified layer.

The question is: which gateway should you use?

Quick Comparison

1. Bifrost by Maxim AI

Platform Overview

Bifrost is a high-performance, open-source AI gateway built by Maxim AI. It unifies access to 12+ providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure, Cohere, Mistral, Groq, and Ollama, through a single OpenAI-compatible API. Bifrost is designed for zero-config startup: drop it in and start routing instantly, with no complex setup required.

At under 11 microseconds of overhead, Bifrost is engineered to be one of the fastest open-source LLM gateways available, making it suitable for latency-sensitive production workloads.

Key Features

• Unified Interface: Single OpenAI-compatible endpoint across all supported providers; swap models with one line of code
• Automatic Fallbacks: Seamless failover across providers and models with zero downtime
• Load Balancing: Intelligent request distribution across multiple API keys and providers
• Semantic Caching: Caches responses based on semantic similarity to cut costs and reduce latency
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): Allows AI models to interact with external tools like file systems, web search, and databases
• Budget Management and Governance: Virtual keys, team-level rate limiting, and hierarchical cost controls
• Observability: Native Prometheus metrics, distributed tracing, and comprehensive logging
• Custom Plugins: Extensible middleware for analytics, monitoring, and custom logic
• Multimodal Support: Text, image, audio, and streaming behind a common interface
• Drop-in Replacement: Replaces OpenAI or Anthropic SDK calls with a single URL change

Best For

Engineering teams that need a fast, open-source gateway with production-grade reliability, multi-provider fallbacks, and tight integration with an evaluation and observability layer. Bifrost pairs natively with Maxim AI's evaluation platform and LLM observability tools, giving teams end-to-end visibility from gateway to production.

2. Cloudflare AI Gateway

Platform Overview

Cloudflare AI Gateway is part of Cloudflare's developer platform, acting as a proxy layer between your application and 20+ AI providers. It is tightly integrated with Cloudflare Workers and the broader Cloudflare edge network.

Key Features

• Dynamic Routing: If/else logic and percentage-split traffic routing via a visual dashboard, no code changes required
• Semantic Caching: Reduces redundant API calls for cost savings
• Unified Billing: Manage credits for multiple providers through a single Cloudflare account (closed beta)
• Rate Limiting and Fallbacks: Built-in resilience with model fallback on errors
• DLP and Content Moderation: PII scanning and prompt/response safety controls
• OpenAI-compatible endpoint: Single /chat/completions URL across providers

Best For

Teams already on the Cloudflare stack who want gateway features with minimal additional infrastructure overhead.

3. LiteLLM

Platform Overview

LiteLLM is a widely used open-source Python library and proxy server that provides a unified interface to 100+ LLMs. It is popular in the developer community for its broad provider coverage and easy integration with frameworks like LangChain.

Key Features

• 100+ provider support via standardized OpenAI-format calls
• Load balancing, fallbacks, and retry logic
• Cost tracking and spend budgets per user or API key
• LangChain, LlamaIndex, and AutoGen integrations
• Self-hosted or cloud deployment options

Best For

Python-heavy teams that need the widest possible provider coverage and framework-level integrations.

4. Vercel AI Gateway

Platform Overview

Vercel AI Gateway is a generally available product from Vercel offering a single endpoint to access hundreds of AI models. It is designed with developer experience in mind and integrates tightly with the Vercel hosting ecosystem and the Vercel AI SDK.

Key Features

• Access to hundreds of models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and more
• Low-latency routing (under 20ms overhead)
• Automatic failover if a provider goes down
• OpenAI API compatible
• Per-model usage, latency, and error observability

Best For

Frontend and full-stack teams building on Vercel with Next.js who want AI routing without managing additional infrastructure.

5. Kong AI Gateway

Platform Overview

Kong AI Gateway extends Kong's mature API management platform with AI-specific capabilities. It is plugin-based and supports self-hosted, Kubernetes, hybrid, and Kong Konnect managed deployment modes.

Key Features

• Universal LLM API across OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure AI, and more
• Semantic Routing: Routes requests to the best-fit model based on prompt similarity and intent, at runtime
• Semantic caching with vector database integration (Redis)
• PII sanitization across 20+ categories and 12 languages
• RAG pipeline automation at the gateway layer
• MCP traffic governance and security
• 60+ AI plugins for observability, prompt engineering, and governance
• Declarative configuration via decK and Terraform

Best For

Enterprises that already run Kong for API management and want to add AI governance, semantic routing, and compliance controls to their existing API infrastructure.

Choosing the Right Gateway

The right choice depends on your team's priorities:

• Speed and open source with evaluation built in: Bifrost + Maxim AI
• Cloudflare ecosystem: Cloudflare AI Gateway
• Maximum provider coverage in Python: LiteLLM
• Vercel-hosted frontend apps: Vercel AI Gateway
• Enterprise API governance at scale: Kong AI Gateway

For teams focused on shipping reliable AI products, pairing a gateway like Bifrost with an observability and evaluation platform like Maxim AI ensures full-stack quality from routing through to production monitoring. See how teams use Maxim to monitor AI reliability in production.